It's possible, but it really appears to me that these ads are not videos that are loaded separately, but are simply portions of the video stream that the app ha

It's possible, but it really appears to me that these ads are not videos that are loaded separately, but are simply portions of the video stream that the app has tagged with timestamps indicating that they are ads. Perhaps pi-holing the ad server could prevent it from loading metadata about these ad timestamps, but I would guess that it's simply shipped as part of the request that loads all the necessary metadata about the video stream. This really feels more like a system to prevent skipping commercials that are already in the video stream, and less like an integration with a third-party ads SDK that loads its own ads and shows them over the real video.